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Idc paper on disaster recovery
1. I D C A N A L Y S T C O N N E C T I O N
Robert Amatruda
Research Director, Data Protection and Recovery
Disaster Recovery: Improving Time to
Readiness
March 2011
For many organizations, the volume of data continues to increase even as they experience demands
for increasingly faster disaster recovery (DR) responses. To manage data volumes and disaster
recovery requirements, many enterprises are deploying disk systems in conjunction with data
deduplication technologies. Using deduplication storage for data protection can help organizations
achieve two goals: efficiently manage the growing data volumes and be prepared to handle the most
pressing disaster recovery scenarios. Most customers are challenged with recovery of their backup
data in a timely and efficient manner. Recovery of backup data can pose many challenges because it
is generally not replicated like data written to tier 1 disk for rapid recovery. In many instances,
customers must restore their backup data from removable media such as tape. Restoring backup
data from tape can be time consuming, cumbersome, and costly. In essence, disaster recovery
readiness is never fully realized when one is restoring backups from tape.
The following questions were posed by EMC to Robert Amatruda, research director of IDC's Data
Protection and Recovery service, on behalf of EMC's customers.
Q. What is the most common disaster recovery architecture you see in the market today,
and what are some of the challenges associated with this architecture?
A. Currently, the most common disaster recovery architecture in place still relies on shipping
tapes via truck to a DR site where data is stored offsite in case the primary site is unavailable
for recovery. There are significant challenges with this tape-based approach, including the
costs of tape management and the risk of tapes being lost or stolen.
Moreover, rapid and reliable recovery of data can be very problematic if the data resides on
physical tape cartridges. To restore a data volume from physical tape, a customer needs to
locate the tape cartridge. In some cases, that may mean recalling a tape cartridge from an
offsite location. This adds countless hours to the restore time and requires numerous
personnel. In addition, once the tape is recalled, there is a possibility that the data will no
longer be readable because of tape corruption.
Q. How has technology evolved to the benefit of customers in terms of improving
disaster recovery and the ability to meet service-level agreements (SLAs)?
A. Disaster recovery solutions continue to evolve to meet ever-challenging SLAs. Customers
are utilizing more disk-based systems with deduplication for faster and more efficient backup
and recovery. Deduplication allows customers to remove redundant backup data and move
only unique data to the DR site. In addition, with proper design, these systems allow users to
concurrently back up, deduplicate, and replicate for the fastest time to DR readiness. As a
IDC 1106